


Rest, Now

by fandomfrolics



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Background Relationships, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Fix-It, Mostly Gen, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Canon Fix-It, Tony Stark-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-05-16
Packaged: 2020-03-05 19:46:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18835531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandomfrolics/pseuds/fandomfrolics
Summary: When Tony snaps his fingers, he wishes the Mad Titan away. The consequences are far more reaching than he could have imagined.(Or, the fix-it in which Tony gets a chance to go back and do it all again, this time with slightly less alien-induced trauma)





	Rest, Now

**Author's Note:**

> Okay as much as I hated the ending of Endgame for a lot of reasons, I absolutely DESPISED the whole 'You can rest now' thing at the end more than anything. It just read to me personally as a big fuck you to anyone with mental illness like the only escape for them was death and it honestly sent me on a pretty bad spiral for a couple of weeks. Death is not rest! It's death!! There should be no glory in it! Especially when there's a family left behind! 
> 
> Anyway, here's a fix-it.

“I am inevitable,” he says and Tony clenches his teeth, thinks of all the pain this abomination has wrought on his life, the sleepless nights and panic attacks, the death and destruction that had been inflicted by his own two hands because he was trying to protect them all from _this_.

“I...am...Iron Man,” he grits out and he snaps his fingers and _wills_ with all his might for all of it to be over, once and for all.

And everything goes black.

\--

He wakes up.

Something seems off. _Everything_ seems off.

He pries his eyes open. White everywhere. He blinks, blinks again, trying to focus on what he’s seeing. If it turns out Carl Sagan was wrong about the afterlife he’s going to be really pissed.

_Beep. Beep. Beep._

His brain catches up to what his ears have been telling it - unfortunately the steady beep of a heart monitor is a sound he’s all too familiar with - but it seems impossible to be hearing it now. All of his calculations had told him it _should_ be impossible.

He survived.

The door opens and is shut quietly after the soft shuffle of feet into the room. He twists his head, trying to catch a glimpse of who it might be and clenches his jaw on a scream as the movement makes every nerve in his body come to life.

“You’re awake,” comes a gasp and a moment later Pepper’s face appears above him. She reaches a hand towards his face but pauses, keeping it hovering carefully in the air. Then, ever so slowly, she lays the hand on his cheek, touch as light as a feather.

“Hi,” he croaks, his throat aching for far too many reasons.

Her eyes well up, spill over almost immediately and she chokes out a laugh that has as much chance of passing for a sob.

“Hi,” she whispers back.

And suddenly the world tilts right back onto its axis again.

\--

Here’s what he knows.

He survived. His world didn’t. Or his timeline. It’s all very vague and veers too closely towards ‘magic’ for his liking. But as far as he can tell, when he snapped his fingers and willed Thanos out of his life and, unthinkingly, his mind, the Infinity Gauntlet had taken him a bit too literally. Which his how he found himself back in pre-Chitauri New York, with one loving girlfriend, one almost complete Stark tower…

...and one less arm.

From what Pepper tells him, JARVIS ( _JARVIS_ , oh god, how he’d missed JARVIS) had alerted Rhodey to a spike in his vitals and fresh off the Palladium drama, Rhodey’d immediately tracked him down only to find him passed out upstate, in his old armor, his old body - everything 2012 Tony should have been but unconscious and bleeding out of a gaping hole in his shoulder.

Tony being unable to answer the _how_ of it all scares Pepper enough to call in reinforcements and it’s a good minute of staring before he can find enough of his voice to greet the ghost that appears in his doorway.

“Do you remember anything that happened?” Coulson asks while Fury stares at him with his one good eye.

His mind seems to be struggling to reconcile his past that’s become his present with his future that is now his past. _I’m not marching to Fury’s fife_ he thinks he wants to say, but he meets the man’s gaze and _I’m just an old man who cares very much about you_ comes zipping through his head instead, a memory much clearer than the first for the lack of blue glow around it.

He really did owe Thanos for a lot.

But he owes everyone else much, much more and he’s got the chance, now, to do it all again. To do it right.

“Nick,” he says, “there’s some stuff I need to tell you.”

\--

Just like with Fury, his first meeting with Steve goes a lot better without the blue stick of doom dredging up the worst of them. And though it stings to admit it, it helps a _little_ to have that recent memory of his fumbling and nervous soon-to-be father to temper the less pleasant echoes of a childhood growing up in the shadow of a ghost.

So when he shakes Captain America’s hand and looks him in the eye purportedly for the first time, all he can see is how lonely and _young_ the poor guy looks. He’s a man out of time and now, without the Chitauri attack, a soldier without a mission as well.

“C’mon, Rogers,” he says, throwing an arm around his shoulder, “how about we take a break from the SHIELD reports and training exercises and go grab a couple of burgers? I’ll catch you up on some of the stuff you might have missed, doing time as a Capsicle.” He squeezes his shoulder until Steve meets his gaze and gives him a soft smile to soften the nickname.

Steve’s lips quirk up in an ever so tiny smile back. “You know Mr. Stark, I think I’d like that.”

“Please,” Tony says, turning them towards the exit, “call me Tony.”

\--

They still form the team, of course, but this time without the pressure of aliens and gods and nukes on Manhattan. He keeps their headquarters at the Tower, building out the state-of-the-art facilities he’d had planned before the partial destruction of New York. The central location makes it easier for everyone to come and go and for them to drop in on Bleecker Street and convince the wizard that’s in everyone’s best interest to keep the lines of communication open between them.

He works with Steve on their training regimens and team events. He doesn’t want it to be like last time, where it’s a year after their first fight together that they all meet again and another six months before they can spend more than an hour in the same room. And it’s got the added bonus of accelerating Steve’s modern-day catch-up, incentivizing him to get the lay of the land so he can make the best-informed decisions on what their weekly activities should involve.

It’s another couple of months before Tony feels ready to tell Steve and Fury the rest of it - about Hydra and Bucky and Pierce. Steve, predictably, is pissed that he didn’t mention it sooner but Tony still remembers the look that had been ever-present in Steve’s eyes, those first few weeks. He didn’t think he could be the bearer of one more heartbreak then.

Still, it means Steve stops talking to him for a little while and though Tony’d been expecting it, it leaves him with an unanticipated ache in his gut. But he lets them to it - Steve and Fury, Nat and Clint and Coulson. He’s learned to delegate now and SHIELD has never much been his business.

In the meantime he focuses his efforts on the one thing he won’t, he _can’t_ delegate - oversight. Without Sokovia, without his personal failures, he’s got more wiggle room to make it work for everyone. Because even after everything they all went through, he still believes that some form of this is necessary - they all need training and they definitely all need to be held accountable for their actions. So he works with T’Chaka and T’Challa, gets it all together while his lawyers work around the clock to get Bucky exonerated for all of the Winter Soldier’s crimes. And when Steve comes around to unnecessarily thank him, Tony’s ready to ask him to listen.

\--

SHIELD falls apart in the wake of the Hydra fallout and it’s Fury who needs to pick up the pieces, which leaves a hole at the head of this thing they’re doing, this team that’s grown and grown and taken on a life of its own.

“You think Rogers is ready for it?” Fury asks, Coulson looking on intently beside him and Tony shakes his head.

“I don’t even think he wants it,” he replies. He stares up at the map on the screen, at the swelling network of dots across it, each representing a hero taking on the fights that no one else can or that no one else _will_ , and he thinks about the one constant who’s been there through it all.

“No,” he says. “It should be Nat.”

\--

The morning Spider-Man finally shows up on YouTube Tony’s heart just about leaps out of his chest. He knows it’s probably selfish, knows that a better man would’ve hoped for the boy to never have to be part of his world at all but the gaping hole in his chest that misses him can’t listen to logic and Tony’s got too many other unplugged wounds to care.

\--

Preoccupied as he is with the trainings and meetings and legal paperwork in addition to all his work at SI, he’s more than a little blindsided when Pepper cuts in to his dinnertime story about Peter’s latest save with a blurted out, “I’m pregnant”.

 _I dreamt we had a kid_ floats unbidden into his head. _We named him after your eccentric uncle._ He grits his teeth together and swallows the words down hard. He won’t do that, _can’t_ do that - can’t bear the thought of calling for another child day-after-day and only thinking of _her_.

He’s grieved, of course, grieved for the gorgeous little girl he’ll never see again, the child he’ll never have in this new world order. And though he knows the likelihood that their genes would combine again in that exact way is infinitesimally small, he’s still _terrified_ that his second child will come out a physical carbon copy of his first and he isn’t sure his weakened heart could bear it.

He can’t tell if it’s relief he’s feeling when Pepper gives birth to a beautiful baby boy.

\--

(He’d told Pepper about her of course, way back when he first woke. But it was back when she still wasn’t sure _what_ to believe and he doesn’t think he can find it in him to talk about it all again.)

\--

Natasha’s taken it further than Tony had ever would’ve dreamed, seamlessly coordinating missions all around the world and, with the Guardians, Carol, and Thor (and improbably, sometimes Loki), even beyond.

And then there’s those he presumably hadn’t been around long enough to meet the first time - Reed and his family, the mutants, materializing out of the woodwork, emboldened by the security of the updates he and Charles and their team of lawyers had made to the Accords together.

The days start to fly by unstoppably and with them come another boy and then right on his heels, a girl. And Tony, he’s always loved building things but there’s nothing he’s ever loved building as much as this family. This team.

\--

And then one day it hits him. It’s as an unremarkable day as any - he’s monitoring a training session that’s pitted Hawkeye and Falcon against the Hulk and Spider-Man in a weird version of Capture the Flag. Carol and some of the others are sleeping in late after a week-long mission off-planet and Cap and Bucky are out overseeing a medical supplies handoff in Sudan.

He’s not sure what triggers it - the mission success alert from Cap, the new Quinjet specs from Shuri appearing in his inbox (as well as yet another sly update for his prosthetic arm), or even the text from Nat informing him she’s ordering in a pancake breakfast for the team - but it settles over him like a blanket, a creeping warmth from the inside, where the arc reactor used to be, spreading all the way up to his head and down to his toes.

He knows now that there is no ending the fight. There’ll always be something else, someone else. But as he’s standing there in his thoroughly unarmored jeans and t-shirt, watching through the glass as Sam swings Clint up at the perfect angle to knock Peter off of Bruce’s Hulked-out arm, he finally sees - he’s not in this alone.

“Daddy!” a gleeful shout rings out and he turns his head, automatically dropping to one knee at the sound of pattering footsteps and scoops up the blur sprinting towards him.

“Hi, precious,” he says as he straightens and presses a kiss to her cheek. She’s immediately enraptured by the scene playing out before her, her darting eyes glued to her favorite superhero as he webs through the air. Tony tightens his grip around her and buries his nose in her soft hair, inhaling the scent of her sweet shampoo as Falcon’s victory shout rings out somewhere above him.

It’s okay, his heart says.

He can rest now.


End file.
